How to Compete With Amazon and eBay in Google Search
You are not going to outrank a marketplace on a generic product term and you should stop trying. What you can win is the specific, the expert and the branded. The question most shops actually face is not whether to compete with them but whether to sell on them.
What You Are Actually Up Against
A marketplace has more products than you, more pages pointing at it than you could ever acquire. A name people search for directly. On a generic product term you are not going to outrank it. That is not a failure of your website.
Scale. Millions of pages, continuously updated.
Whatever your catalogue, theirs is larger, which means for almost any product term they have a page and frequently several.
Strength. Decades of accumulated links and mentions.
That is not something a shop closes by working harder. It is the result of being one of the most linked destinations on the internet.
Breadth. They carry what you carry and everything adjacent.
A shopper landing there can complete a whole basket. On your shop they may find one item.
Why saying so matters. Because shops blame themselves for this.
A store owner watching a marketplace hold the top position for their main product term reasonably concludes something is wrong with their site. Usually nothing is. They are losing a contest that was never winnable. Understanding that is what frees the budget for the contests that are.
What this page is not. An attack on them.
Marketplaces are legitimate businesses and a great many shops make good money selling through them. Block six treats that as a serious option rather than a defeat.
Where The Head Terms Have Gone
Some searches are effectively unavailable to an independent shop. Knowing which lets you stop paying somebody to pursue them.
Generic product terms. The name of a common item, on its own.
These are contested by every marketplace and every national retailer at once. A specialist shop can occasionally appear. It is rarely where the effort pays.
Bare brand and model terms for widely stocked items. Where hundreds of sellers list the same thing.
The searcher has already chosen the product, so per our product page guide this is a price and delivery comparison you may not want to win.
Anything where the top results are all listings. The simplest test available.
Look at what currently ranks for a term. If the first page is marketplaces and national retailers with nothing else among them, that pattern is stable and it is telling you something.
What that leaves. Considerably more than it sounds.
Everything with a qualifier attached, everything a specialist would recognise, everything phrased as a question. Everything about your own name. Blocks three to five are those.
The commercial consequence. Redirecting the budget rather than reducing it.
A shop that stops competing for unwinnable terms usually finds it can afford to win a great many smaller ones instead.
Where A Specialist Genuinely Wins
Six situations where a focused shop beats a marketplace reliably. Each is a case where breadth is a disadvantage rather than an advantage.
Narrow categories. A grouping too specific for a general catalogue to organise properly.
A marketplace selling fasteners has a fasteners category. A fastener specialist has a page for stainless socket screws by size, which a general catalogue would never build because it has no reason to.
Expertise. Where choosing is genuinely difficult.
Somebody selecting a wood finish for a particular timber and use needs advice rather than a listing. Nobody at a marketplace is going to write that.
Unusual or technical products. Where few sellers carry the item.
Scarcity does the work. A specialist component stocked by three retailers has almost nothing competing for the term.
Bundles and kits. Combinations somebody assembled deliberately.
Everything needed for a specific job, gathered by somebody who has done the job. A marketplace lists parts. It does not think about what goes together.
Service and advice. Fitting, sizing, custom cutting, technical support before purchase.
Anything requiring a person is ground a marketplace has chosen not to occupy.
Anything phrased as a real question. Which of these do I need, what is the difference, will this fit my situation.
A listing cannot answer a question. That is block four.
Content They Cannot Produce
A marketplace has listings. It does not have somebody who has used the products, fitted them or spent ten years answering the same question. That gap cannot be closed by scale.
Why they cannot close it. It is structural rather than a choice.
A marketplace carries too many categories to have expertise in any of them. Employing specialists across every product type it sells would cost more than the categories earn, which is precisely why the model works.
What that leaves for you. Everything requiring judgement.
How to choose between two options. What people commonly get wrong. What the cheaper version costs you in practice. What to buy for a specific situation rather than in general.
Where the material comes from. Your own business, at no research cost.
The questions your staff answer daily are content nobody else can produce, because nobody else has your customers. Most shops never write any of it down.
Why this is defensible rather than merely good. It cannot be copied cheaply.
Anybody can undercut a price or list the same item. Reproducing genuine knowledge of a product range requires having it. A competitor who copies your guide is publishing something they do not understand.
What it earns beyond rankings. The thing block five is about.
Somebody helped by your advice remembers where they got it, which is how a name is built rather than bought.
Brand Search Is The Real Asset
A marketplace competes with you for generic demand and cannot touch demand for your name. Somebody searching for your shop is not comparing. They have already chosen, so no competitor can outrank you for it.
Why this matters more than any ranking. Because it is the only demand nobody can take.
Every category term you hold can be lost to somebody working harder or spending more. Your own name cannot, which makes brand demand the only genuinely durable asset in this entire subject.
What it does to the economics. Removes the cost of acquisition entirely.
Somebody arriving by name cost nothing to acquire on that visit. Per our page on whether this is worth it, that changes the arithmetic of the whole business rather than of one channel.
How brand demand is actually built. Slowly, from four things.
People who bought and were pleased. People helped by the content in block four without buying. Being visible repeatedly for the terms in block three, since somebody who sees a name three times starts to recognise it. And anywhere your name appears that is not your own website.
Why it compounds. Each source feeds the others.
Content brings people who become customers who tell others and search your name later. That loop accelerates rather than adding up, which is why brand demand is slow for two years and then unrecognisable.
The measurement point. This is why brand and non-brand must be separated.
A report combining them shows growth that may be entirely one or the other. Per our measurement guide that single split matters more than every other number.
Selling On Them Or Against Them
Most shops are not choosing whether to compete with a marketplace in search. They are choosing whether to sell through one, which is a different question with three real costs.
What it costs in fees. A proportion of every sale, plus subscription and fulfilment where applicable.
Check the current schedule for your own category rather than any figure quoted in an article, since these vary by category and change.
What it costs in margin. More than the fee.
Marketplace pricing is visibly comparative, so competing there frequently means pricing lower than you would on your own site. The fee and the price pressure compound.
What it costs in owning the customer. The one shops underestimate.
The marketplace holds the relationship. You may not get the address, cannot readily market to them again. The customer frequently remembers where they bought it rather than who supplied it. You are renting access to a customer who becomes theirs.
What you get for that. Genuinely valuable things.
Immediate access to enormous demand, a trusted checkout, established delivery expectations, then no requirement to build any of it. For a new shop that is the difference between selling and not selling.
Where it is clearly the right answer. Commodity products competing on price and availability.
If the item is identical wherever it comes from and the customer has no reason to care who supplies it, the marketplace is where that demand lives. Building your own version of it is expensive and slow.
Where it is clearly wrong. Where your advantage is the thing in block four.
A marketplace listing cannot carry expertise, so selling there converts a specialist into a commodity supplier competing on price alone.
The Arithmetic
The comparison shops usually make is a quarter of marketplace revenue against a quarter of building their own demand. Over that window the marketplace wins every time. Over three years it frequently does not.
What to put on the marketplace side. Four inputs, all from your own records.
Total fees paid across the period, taken from your own statements rather than from a published rate. Any subscription. Any fulfilment charges. And the margin difference between your marketplace price and your own site price, multiplied by the units sold there.
What to put on the other side. Three inputs.
The cost of building your own demand across the same period. Whatever additional revenue that produced. And the value of the customers you now hold directly, which is where repeat purchase belongs.
Why the window changes the answer. The two behave differently over time.
Marketplace cost scales with every sale and never reduces. Own demand costs the same while producing more, per our comparison with advertising, which makes any short window flatter the marketplace and any long one flatter the alternative.
What the calculation usually shows. That both belong, in a proportion.
Very few shops should be entirely on a marketplace or entirely off one. The useful output is a ratio and a direction of travel rather than a decision to abandon either.
Running Both
The arrangement that works for most shops is using the marketplace for reach while deliberately building direct demand, with somebody watching whether the second is actually growing.
How to divide the range. By what each channel suits.
Commodity lines and anything competing on price go to the marketplace, where that demand already is. Specialist products, bundles and anything needing explanation stay on your own site, per blocks three and four.
What the marketplace teaches you. More than shops use.
It shows what sells, at what price, in what volume, before you commit to stocking more of it. That is market research arriving as revenue.
The trap. Comfortable dependence.
Marketplace revenue arrives without effort once established, so the direct side quietly stops being worked on. A shop can spend three years intending to build its own demand while every quarter's growth comes from somewhere it does not control.
How to tell whether the direct side is growing. One measure, checked quarterly.
Revenue from non-brand organic traffic on your own site, alongside brand search volume from block five. If both are flat while marketplace revenue rises, the direct programme is not working regardless of what the overall figure says.
What we ask clients to record. The proportion, every quarter.
What share of revenue came from a channel you control. That number is the whole strategy expressed as one figure. Almost nobody tracks it.
When You Should Just Be On Them
Four situations where a shop should sell through a marketplace and not invest in competing with it. We sell the alternative. A page that cannot name a case is not worth trusting on the ones it does recommend.
Commodity products with no differentiation. Where the item is identical whoever supplies it.
There is nothing for expertise to attach to and no reason for a customer to prefer you. Building demand for that is expensive and the demand already exists elsewhere.
A very small range. Where there is not enough to organise into categories.
A handful of products gives almost nothing to work with, per our page on whether this is worth it.
Testing whether something sells. Before investing in a shop at all.
A marketplace answers that question in weeks for a fee, which is cheaper than finding out slowly on your own site.
Where margin cannot fund acquisition. The decisive one.
If what remains after cost of goods, fulfilment and returns will not cover acquiring a customer, you cannot buy demand at any price. Renting access to demand that already exists is the correct answer. No amount of work changes that.
What connects all four. None is a failure.
Each is a business whose demand genuinely lives somewhere else. Recognising that early is worth more than three years of expensive disagreement with it.
They cannot touch
your own name.
Every category term you hold can be lost to somebody working harder. Demand for your name cannot, which makes it the only genuinely durable asset in this subject. It is slow for two years and then unrecognisable.
What is included every month:
£350 per month, one target area. No setup fee, nothing billed separately.
Twenty-two guides.
One subject.
This guide covers the marketplaces. The rest of the series covers the sequence, structure, category and product pages, technical health, measurement and everything a store owner has to decide.
